Designing is one of the most important steps in manufacturing apparel. In a conventional linear process, the designing step is generally performed by the manufacturer of the apparel, in particular by its designer. That is, a designer may initially develop a set of detailed designs, including at least one pattern for the piece of apparel. Based thereon, instructions for the manufacture of a number of predefined sizes of the piece of apparel are generated by adapting the design to each size. However, such a conventional design process is restricted to the ideas and creations of the designers and a limited set of sizes. In other words, it is quite inflexible. Moreover, changing the initial design by a person different from the designer is virtually impossible.
In the digital age, one option to improve the design process is to use the shape of the body of a person wearing the piece of apparel. For example, applicant disclosed in EP 2 775 456 A2 a method for determining the body shape of a dressed person and a display that displays an avatar with at least one item of clothing. Another method disclosed in US 2005/0049741 A1 relates to making a pressure garment based on a 3D shape and pressure profile characteristics of a garment.
However, a disadvantage of these approaches for a designing process is that only a digital copy of the garments is provided and that the design cannot be further modified.
For example, the t-shirt design machine “Mirror Mirror” of the Korean company MyDesignlab (available at, https://vimeo.com/164654370) provides the possibility that a user may virtually design a t-shirt by using two remote controllers. Moreover, the user may draw samples with the two remote controllers or may select predefined samples.
However, such a t-shirt design machine is still too complex to operate for an ordinary user as usually at least one remote controller is needed. Further, the user would see a projection on the user of the image of the design. This does not provide for a high degree of interaction since the user still has to use remote controls to choose a design. The hands are used as in many other human-computer interfaces to select the design of the shirt, thereby providing a low interactivity for designing the t-shirt.
Further, all of these known tools propose to modify a design of a piece of apparel in a post-production process, such as with pens or screen printing machines, which provide a poor quality product.
There is hence a need in the field to at least reduce the disadvantages described above.
However, even if the above mentioned disadvantages are overcome, there is still the problem that the manufacturing methods and systems known in the art have long process cycle times or do not allow for the production of customized items of apparel. The benefits that may otherwise be obtained by improving on the above outlined disadvantages of the prior art with respect to the design process may be rendered useless.
It is therefore an object of the present invention to provide a more flexible method and system for manufacturing a piece of apparel to improve the physical or virtual design process of the apparel. It is a further object of the present invention to individualize the design and manufacturing process for a piece of apparel and to speed up the entire design and manufacturing process, together with producing high-quality products.